Copper thieves are wreaking havoc across America
wsj.com
wsj.com
Thieves were getting nervous and about to leave without money, SWAT team showed up a bit late to the party, scrap guys said at one point SWAT guy stuck a rifle barrel down thieves throat to get a confession. Police contacted me later and said: " come pick up your wire". Cable had been dragged across asphalt, insulation scratched. Later I drove down to prosecutor's office to try to file for restitution $$$, they avoided me, only secretary took my info., they would never return my calls even.
Copper theft is a felony in Texas, even burning copper wire to get rid of insulation is a criminal act.
Sounds too good to be true. That's a lawsuit waiting to happen.
That always seemed silly that you can’t do this.
You can have all the laws you want but if the DA does not charge then there is nothing you can do, even if arrested, the criminal walks free. And the police eventually stops investigating and making arrests for the crimes that the DA won't charge. And the DA will get re-elected because the voters, as stated above, have no clue, don't know who is the DA or what does he or she do.
Inducement generally means more than merely providing an opportunity. The officers have to try to persuade you to commit a crime.
Purposefully leaving valuables in an unlocked car and prosecuting anyone who took them would probably not be entrapment because normal law abiding people would not take those valuables. The police gave them an opportunity, but the criminal intent originated with the people who took the items.
https://www.gurufocus.com/economic_indicators/4553/inflation...
When it’s unique, yes. In the case, metal theft is documented in Australia, Australia, Canada, France, Czechia, the Netherlands and the UK [1].
(To be fair, I’m not seeing any sources credibly auditing prevalence versus occurrence.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metal_theft#Notable_metal_thef...
eg https://www.premier.sa.gov.au/media-releases/news-items/crac...
Every bit of reliable information I've had points to Meth users (although many years ago I knew of opiate users trying to get copper).
I was recently in New Orleans and had two theft surprises (one positive, one negative:
1: walking in Gretna I noticed an aluminium ladder under a house. You don't leave them visible at home because they get stolen (I presume for metal)
2: an Uber driver pointed out the theft of Aluminium guard rails. Obviously missing at road side. Needed grinders since they were welded infrastructure. I haven't seen much of that level of theft in Christchurch yet.
> From January to June of this year, 9,770 incidents of intentional theft or sabotage on communications networks were reported, according to the Internet & Television Association, a trade group known as NCTA. That is nearly double the number reported in the prior six-month period. The attacks disrupted service for more than eight million customers.
> The cut lines have disrupted 911 emergency calls and internet and landline services, shut down at least one school and left whole city blocks in the dark.
... and to contrast, here in Australia, the mobile networks hadn't properly QAed their production deployment and access to emergency services causing an outage for 13-hours, likely causing people to die. The response was immediately establishing an inquiry and enacting new laws within 31 days of the incident.
https://ia.acs.org.au/article/2025/-no-excuses--as-optus-upg... https://www.acma.gov.au/articles/2025-10/acma-strengthens-in... https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Sen...
In the past few years I've seen so many instances of day-light smash and grabs happening in the US in broad daylight filling my feeds. I've been waiting for the other shoe to drop – will that wave of criminality reach here? Certainly there's been an significant uptick of knife crime in Australia, people with mental health issues shooting cops and stabbing civilians, and the housing crisis is really causing problems around homelessness, but even still, Australia has nothing on the brazenness and scale of what is happening in the US. So when I say that third world problems are affecting the US, I refer to this broader situation.
- https://www.swr.de/swraktuell/baden-wuerttemberg/heilbronn/t...
- https://www.ladepeche.fr/2025/11/14/info-la-depeche-explosiv...
- https://nos.nl/artikel/2591857-na-koperdiefstal-in-veenhuize...
> I didn't do a quantative analysis
And these seem like single data points, one each for 3 different countries, not really giving a sense of frequency. So I'm not sure what you mean.
Two of their sources are from this month, all three are from this year.
But I'm checked out of this argument, because I'm certain anyone who's lived in the US and, say, comes to Australia, would recognise the stark difference in social outcomes and crime levels. But why reflect on that at all? It's far easier to quibble over minutiae.
Nobody even implied coverage. You have three more examples than before.
> I'm certain anyone who's lived in the US and, say, comes to Australia
Live in America. Have come to Australia. Missing your point. You guys have your own conniptions you dial the social anger scale to 11 over. But! You’re typically better than this at presenting and refining views in response to evidence.
So let me clarify. Here's something I said in a comment to you:
> I've seen it show up in the news here just once
So I'm aware that happens even here in Australia, and this has not been my argument from the start. Yes, crime still happens in first-world countries. So it's not that it also happens also outside the US, it's something else: the quality and the quantity.
Now–you should know this, and I don't mean to be condescending, but to be clear–there's a difference between relative and and absolute measures. Like for instance, there's some ~450 homicides in Australia every year. That means that every death basically makes the broadcast news segment. But then Australia only has ~27.2 million people. So to make a fair comparison to another country, that's about 1.6 homicides per 100K people (vs the 6.81 in the US)
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/usa/uni...
So talking about copper theft, the 3 data points there I can't really quantify as copper thefts per X population. I also can't qualify the difference to the daily lives of people. Many of the data points provided outside the US seems to be targeted at business places and depots, whereas the OP article which you posted talks about something much closer to home:
> From January to June of this year, 9,770 incidents of intentional theft or sabotage on communications networks were reported, according to the Internet & Television Association, a trade group known as NCTA. That is nearly double the number reported in the prior six-month period. The attacks disrupted service for more than eight million customers.
> The cut lines have disrupted 911 emergency calls and internet and landline services, shut down at least one school and left whole city blocks in the dark.
Do you see the point I'm trying to make here? If something so brazen and on this scale was happening in Australia, it would be nipped in the bud. I strongly believe that's because the overwhelming majority of Australians feel they have a stake in the country, and, relatively speaking, this country (for all its foibles, and all our misgivings of it) looks after us.
At least in Arizona, it’s a lot of meth addicts. (Friend works in the space, albeit around water versus electrical infrastructure.)
Some of them are. The ones using “hard hats and vests to disguise themselves” and “utilizing more-professional tools, such as battery-operated saws” probably aren’t.
My state regulates selling copper and requires a license for individuals but exempts electricians lmao.
If we have litter and excrement all over the streets, do we blame ourselves instead of the people littering? Is every “this is why we can’t have nice things” situation actually our own fault? How about holding people accountable for their actions?
I'm honestly a bit tired of nothing productive being done about drug addiction. And I am pretty convinced programs like safe injection sites are pushed by NGO's because they make a lot of money off them. A lot of the information suggesting they are useful is pushed by the same groups making major money off running them.
Mind you the US already has globally record setting levels of retribution in the form of imprisonment, death penalties, broken justice system etc.
Perhaps it's worth looking at other G20 countries with lower crime rates, less economic disparity, police that carry minimal weaponry, etc. and ask how is they appear to be doing better.
If that were true, we could simply wait for them to all die out and be done with the problem for good. And since that won’t work, this claim can be dismissed.
It doesn't take desperation to "raid [one]'s own community of basic infrastructure" -- the news shows rich and very un-desperate people doing that right in the open every day, both with and without the protection of the law.
What it does take is people just not caring about each other very much.
It would indeed be great to have a society where even the worst off could be safe and secure, but that seems orthogonal to the problem of why people take from others like this. This is not stealing bread for the day's meal.
I've been acquainted in the past with many people who engaged in this type of crime. Perception is that it is relatively low-risk. It was mostly just a side hustle to pay for beer or drugs, people weren't doing it to put food on the table. There has been a strong underground market for stolen "scrap" metal for as long as I've been alive.
It isn't just copper or catalytic converters. Theft of agricultural irrigation piping is sporadically fashionable, for example.
But this would mean rich people would be less rich and have one less yacht; while currently they happily enjoy the extra yacht; copper theft isn't an issue for them because that's mostly poor people stealing from other poor people.
This would solve problem in days.
I have pounds of copper wire in my garage. How should I sell it?
I love it when people have ideas. I just wish they would think about them more.
Copper has value. If people have this copper in their garage they can then get some value. The copper then goes back into the economy. Win Win. However if there is no gain to recycling it it might not quickly end up back into the economy. This is of course bad.
A totally radical view is to simply outlaw stealing :)
However are you saying that someone selling some extra scrap copper is in any way similar to someone selling their gun? These things are somehow equivalent?
However I will show you the actual connection. What you are doing is making the law abiding citizen be punish for the crimes of the criminal. This happens with fire-arms legislation as well.
The result tends to of course be that citizens lose rights while criminals do as they have before.
This is not a world I want to live in and I hope you would not want this either.
Why do you think life in prison is going to solve the issue? Are you a shareholder of a private prison?
Metal thieves in America's cities
We’ve basically decided that actually reforming the bureaucratic machine is much too hard, so instead of reform let’s just not enforce anything.
One of Zohrans ads is such an on the nose example of this. He has an ad where he says he’s gonna help out small business by cutting down the fines that they face. Which on the surface sort of sounds nice, but now we basically just get shitty businesses selling shitty things and facing small slaps on the wrist instead of actually going through and removing the onerous laws and enforcing the important ones.
Same thing going on with immigration. The system is so fucked up, that instead of reform we simply won’t enforce immigration laws.
You see the same thing with housing that abundance basically called out. The system has gotten really good at writing more and more complicated laws at the cost of things basically falling apart in the real world
These copper thefts affect millions of people. It regularly happens to the MTA and shuts down the subway. A functional society would make an example of people committing these thefts so that the rest of us can continue to contribute and live their lives without being screwed by antisocial people
The right to use drugs in public, to camp in a park, to steal copper, to do sexually inappropriate stuff, to break laws, all seem to be more important than societal safety, comfort, and peace now.
It’s very hard for me to make a case for urban living, and more apartments, and less cars when the average experience in cities in America is rampant drug use, and tons of unenforced quality of life issues.
LA is similar unless you never leave your little neighborhood.
DC was similar when I lived there about 4 years ago.
SF is cleaning up, but I’ve regularly walked on streets where it’s just bodies and needles
I was shocked by the Vietnamese area of Seattle. It felt like a zombie land.
I mean, if we’re talking city core yeah this it the average experience. I say this as someone who loves cities, American cities leave a lot to be desired and a lot of that comes from simply refusing to enforce basic laws that the rest of the world (including much more left countries) don’t hesitate to do.
I've lived in the NYC metro area for nearly two decades and have yet to see a single one. Definitely saw them when I lived in Baltimore, and have seen them in Philly, but even then not "regularly" in either case.
To some degree it makes sense: Policing doesn't stop people from being addicts, or homeless, or being mentally ill, so why should the police harass these people? The part they're missing is that in aggregate, it significantly lowers quality of life for everybody else. But we're just supposed to ignore it because ...privilege?
The left isn’t generally in control of policing.
That’s a weird excuse to be soft on crime.
> If people aren't being punished then the population as a whole isn't going to bother reporting them to the police in the first place.
Well right there is the reason they should still be doing their job. Because you’re right, if the police stop arresting people, why would anybody report crime to the police?
Where does ICE fit into your view that immigration policy is too soft?
I just don't see how you can view America's plight as being due to soft, left wing policy. It has a right wing populist government and a partisan judiciary.
The post is (clearly to me) referring to left’s much more welcoming stance to immigration. (“No person is illegal.”)
But immigration policy =/= immigration enforcement. I think ICE needs to exist and needs to enforce the laws. Do I think maskless thugs dragging people from their homes is good? No. Screw that. They need to be dressed in uniform and follow laws. But we DO need enforcement and if you’re illegal I think you’ve got to go while simultaneously we need to offer a straightforward avenue beyond the lefts idea of simply abdicating any sort of enforcement
Inevitably, people saw through the virtue signalling and ended up recalling him. I voted for him initially because he sounded good on paper ("a DA with a heart") but when it actually came to running the office, he was a disaster.
Case in point: SF is overrun with Honduran drug dealers. But Chesa was convinced that they are all victims of human trafficking and refused to enforce the laws against them! His office would either not file charges against them, or just let them walk with a slap on the wrist. Naturally, in the Hondo drug dealer circles it was a well known fact that if you ever get picked up in SF, claim that you were trafficked there and/or that you are underage.
After a couple of years people had had enough of this circue, and decided to recall him. I voted to recall him at the first chance I got.
As a former New Yorker who grew up in the Bay Area, I disagree.
Chesa had zero public experience prior to his run, and he never moderated his position, not even after being ousted from office. In the end, he was elected by fewer than 90,000 people [1]. (Smaller than the population of Manhattan’s Chinatown [2].)
Mamdani has some experience as a city legislator. And he moderated between his primary and the general, the latter which he won with more than a million votes [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_San_Francisco_District_At...
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/manhattan-neighborhoods-...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025_New_York_City_mayoral_ele...
I'm going to invoke Murc's law ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murc%27s_law ) here and call out that this is an example of ascribing all agency in government to the left (and considering the right to be a force of nature that can't do anything but what they're going to do).
> Murc’s Law is a term that describes a tendency in political journalism to attribute responsibility or agency only to Democratic Party actors, while treating Republican actions as inevitable or structurally determined. The term originated in the left-wing blogosphere and has since gained traction in commentary about press bias and political framing.
Leopards eating faces or the scorpion and the frog ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Scorpion_and_the_Frog )...
These sorts of things are not a "the left has stopped enforcing laws" (the left has no ability to enforce or not enforce laws), but rather there has been a concerted effort to remove the ability for government to operate and regulate people organizations.
That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Yes, reform is hard. It is made more difficult when there aren't resources to do the reforms. It is furthermore difficult to do reforms when the suggested alternatives are "privatize it, move it to the states (or to cities), let the market figure it out."
Left DAs absolutely have the ability to enforce or not enforce laws.
> That effort is not lead by the left. There are people who are making those choices to reduce funding for all parts of government or reduce the ability for government to pay for those things or diverting the funds. The people typically doing that or drawing up the plans for how to do this are typically not on the left.
Who was saying "defund the police"? And yes, some of them were actually trying to do that, to do exactly what they said.